The Generative AI Copyright Fight Is Just Getting Started

The biggest fight of the generative AI revolution is headed to the courtroom—and no, it’s not about the latest boardroom drama at OpenAI. AI builders have largely assumed that using copyrighted material as training data is perfectly legal under the umbrella of “fair use”—after all, they’re only borrowing the work to extract statistical signals from it, not trying to pass it off as their own. That’s why we’re in this case.” The Authors Guild, which is building a tool that will help generative AI companies pay to license its members’ works, believes there can be perfectly ethical ways to train AI. Generative AI is fair use, he argued, noting the similarities of the recent legal disputes with past lawsuits, some involving the Author’s Guild, in which indexing creative works so that search engines could efficiently find them survived challenges. “What they don’t want is for people with copyrights to have a veto over what they want to do.” Masnick responded that he was also concerned about who gains power from AI, arguing that requiring tech companies to pay artists would further entrench the largest AI players by making it too expensive for insurgents to train their systems.